Article Index

Among the hundreds of people who answered Ferguson’s call that
weekend were dozens of Palestine solidarity activists who came as part of the Palestine Contingent.

Progressive except for
Palestine

Delivering a statement of solidarity on behalf of the Palestine
Contingent at a massive rally in downtown St. Louis on 11 October, Suhad Khatib
of the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee said to
the crowd, “We recognize that none of us is free until all of us are free. We
know Black liberation in this country will lead to liberation for all.”

Ashley Yates, co-founder of Millennial Activists United, a social justice
organization created after Brown’s killing, responded, “Palestinians were the
first people to reach out in support while we were getting tear gassed. We
stand with y’all.”

The crowd thundered
with applause.

Powerful moments such as these place liberal and progressive
Israel apologists who support Ferguson in the awkward position of having to
reconcile their opposition to racist militarized policing in the US with their
unbridled support for the Israeli apartheid regime that rules over
Palestinians.

Susan Talve, described to
me by several activists as “the most progressive rabbi in St. Louis,” embodies
this dissonance.

Soon after Talve
returned to St. Louis, Michael Brown was murdered and she transformed into a
racial justice warrior regularly featured in local media agitating against
racist policing.

To the dismay of some activists frustrated by her stance on
Palestine, Talve was invited to address hundreds of people at an interfaith
rally held inside St. Louis University’s Chaifetz Arena on Sunday, 12 October.
She appeared alongside Holocaust survivor and
longtime Palestine solidarity activist Hedy Epstein, as well as Princeton
University professor Cornel West.

“St. Louis is one of
the most racist cities in the country and that goes down through the ranks all
the way down to the ordinary person in the street,” Epstein told me before the
rally, noting that she sees her activism for Palestine as inseparable from the
battle against segregation and racist policing in St. Louis.

Israel and the United
States “are not only sharing values, they’re sharing procedures that the
Israelis use on Palestinians with the local police in the United States,” she
added.

Epstein opened her
speech in the stadium with an anecdote about being singled out for
discrimination as a Jewish child in Nazi Germany. This, she explained, is what
motivates her activism for equality from St. Louis to Palestine. Her fierce
condemnation of the Israeli military occupation in Palestine was met with
roaring applause.

Defending “horrible”
Israel

Cornel West elicited
loud cheers as well when he denounced Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and
the libelous smear of anti-Semitism routinely deployed against Israel’s
critics.

When Talve took to the
podium and declared, “Black and brown lives matter,” a voice from the stands
bellowed back, “What about Palestine, Susan?”

After the event, I
asked Talve what motivated her to speak out about Ferguson.

“This is personal,”
she told me. “These are our children and they are being profiled, they are
being harassed and they are being shot. And I’m a mother and I have children of
color in my community and I don’t want to see any more of our people killed.”

Sadly, Talve’s
uncompromising appeal to justice and equality for police brutality victims in
St. Louis vanished when I shifted the subject to Palestine.

Though she conceded the occupation is wrong, rather than support
the Palestinian call to boycott, divest from and
sanction (BDS) Israel until it complies with international law,
Talve believes in maintaining a Jewish exclusivist state on the off-chance she
may one day need a spare country.

“A lot of American
Jews are very conflicted as I am about the occupation,” said Talve, but
“they’re scared for Israel because we don’t feel safe in this country.”

“There’s a lot of
anti-Semitism and as horrible as it is Israel’s really the only place that will
take us without question,” she reasoned.

Talve was pressed for
time and could not elaborate, but promised to continue the conversation later.
However, she did not return subsequent calls.

Oppressors work
together

The feelings of
discomfort and fear expressed by progressives like Talve and Kaiman have had
little impact on the growing bond between the African American and
Palestinian liberation struggles, largely because it is increasingly
apparent that their oppressors are working together.

Decades of testing methods of domination and control on a
captive and disenfranchised Palestinian population has given rise to Israel’s
booming “homeland security industry,”
which refashions occupation-style repression for use on marginalized
populations in other parts of the world, especially the United States.

Under the cover of counterterrorism training nearly every major
US law enforcement agency has traveled to Israel for lessons in occupation
enforcement, including the St. Louis County and St. Louis Metropolitan police
departments. Since Michael Brown’s death, both agencies have on several
occasions rampaged through
the streets of St. Louis in military-style combat gear with the intention of
crushing the Ferguson demonstrations, to no avail.

As the spirit of
Ferguson’s resistance spreads to other American cities, so too has awareness
about Israel’s influence on American policing.

“This is a
Zionist-free zone,” declared local activist Eugene Puryear at a 25 November
Ferguson solidarity march in Washington, DC.

As he slammed Israel for training US police departments over the
loudspeaker, Puryear told demonstrators that the DC police tactic of keeping
the red and blue lights on the roof of their police cruisers flashing at all
times is a practice adopted directly from
Israeli police by former DC police chief Charles Ramsey after a
2003 training visit.

“It’s no accident that
people who would kill an innocent person in one country would train people who
would kill an innocent person in another country. If you think this is just
about America, you in trouble,” said Puryear. “It’s not about our civil rights,
it’s about our human rights. We are human beings. Our struggle does not have
any borders. When we come together, we have power.”

Local community
organizer Asantewaa Nkrumah-Ture was thrilled to see this connection being
made.

“That’s something
people like me have been working on for a long long time,” she told me. “We
suffer from the same thing and that’s colonial occupation. Colonial occupation
in terms of Africa. Colonial occupation of our communities here in the United
States by police and their agencies. Certainly Palestine is occupied because
the Zionists took the land from the Palestinians before 1948.”

Invisible walls

“When the checkpoints went up and the tanks
came in and the tear gas flew, I ain’t seen no difference from Palestine,”
Bassem Masri told me, recalling the days in the immediate aftermath of Michael
Brown’s killing.

Masri, a 27-year-old
Palestinian American from St. Louis, has been on the front lines with his
smartphone, livestreaming the Ferguson uprising since Brown was shot dead in
broad daylight, his lifeless body left uncovered in the hot Missouri sun for
four and a half hours.

Masri has been arrested twice since then, the first time during
a protest and the second time for driving without a license — even though he
was in the passenger’s seat. During the first arrest, St. Louis city police pressured him to inform on
his fellow protesters, but he refused.

Masri’s mother is from Ramallah and his father is
from occupied East Jerusalem,
where he once lived for three years. This left him with a deeper understanding
of life under brutal occupation and apartheid.

Masri said that the
system in his home city is in some ways even more insidious than Israeli
occupation. Unlike the concrete walls of apartheid in Palestine, he said, the
walls of separation in St. Louis are amorphous and harder to tear down.

“There’s the invisible
wall and the real one. The real one is easier to break,” he explained.

“They just trying to
squeeze the neighborhoods for everything they can get,” said Masri.

“I’m not a poor person
but I’ve been caught in a cycle. It’s driven me to poverty … I ended up in jail
for months for traffic tickets, usually for two to three weeks at a time,” he
explained. “Each one of these tickets ends up being $300 or $400. I have 27
active warrants, mostly for driving on a revoked license and because I’m so
behind I can’t pay this shit.”

“There’s been times where I went out of town for work and the
night after I get back, the cops come to my house, intimidate my mother at the
door and come get me out my bed at like six in the morning,” said Masri,
describing a scene that sounded like a lighter version of an Israeli night raid
in the occupied West Bank.

“If [St. Louis police]
could barge into our houses right now, Israeli-style, and take pictures of our
beds, they would do it. But as Americans, we have rights. That’s what we’re
trying to enforce,” he said.

“St. Louis is
segregated beyond anything you’ll see in America,” contended Masri, a statement
repeated by almost every resident I spoke to. And they weren’t exaggerating.

“Black lives matter”

Vonderrit Myers,
18, was gunned down by a white off-duty St. Louis city police officer on 8
October. The next night, I attended a candlelight vigil just feet away from the
site of his slaying.

As I watched the scene
unfold, it was hard to believe that just two hours earlier I was eating dinner
at a nearby Mexican restaurant, watching a group of young, carefree white
professionals enjoy their Thursday night over a round of Jägerbombs. Though the
restaurant was just around the corner from the protest, it felt like a world
away.

Struggling for
survival

For Low Key, a
15-year-old Ferguson protester from the St. Louis County municipality of
Wellston, the uprising against police violence boils down to a struggle for
survival.

“Police always been
killing our community, they always been trying to extinguish our race,” he told
me. “Now it got to the point where they getting more brutal. They really just
trying to kill off the ‘90s babies because it’s nobody ever over eighteen.
That’s why I’m motivated. Because I’m gonna be next. I’m fifteen. I only got
three years if that’s the case. I cannot live knowing I only got three years.”

“They say I’m a
target. I told them I’m not an easy one. I’m gonna be the hardest target you
can hit,” he added.

“Occupation is a problem from Palestine to Providence to
Ferguson to New York to
everywhere. Within our organizing we aim to end occupation and end Zionism and all the things
that come with it, such as militarism and extreme racist violence,” Gomez told
me.

We talked as it poured
rain at a protest outside the office of Robert McCulloch, the St. Louis County
prosecutor, who had been tasked with convening a grand jury to decide whether
or not to indict Darren Wilson for Michael Brown’s slaying.

Demonstrators were calling for McCulloch to recuse himself from
the case in light of his failure to prosecute a single police officer for
excessive force throughout his decades-long
career. McCulloch’s father, a police officer, was killed by a Black
man while on duty in 1964, raising additional concerns about bias.

Just as the community expected, the grand jury decided not to
indict Darren Wilson, mainly because of McCulloch’s manipulative tactics. He
acted more like Wilson’s defense
attorney than a prosecutor.

This decision and the militarized police violence which followed
predictably incited a riot. As stores were looted and burned down in response,
protesters, the vast majority of them peaceful, were lectured by pundits,
commentators and even President Barack Obama for reacting impolitely to
murderous impunity.

In stark contrast, the
state violence directed at demonstrators managed to escape condemnation.

The Providence student
delegation cringed at the incessant finger wagging directed at youth who
sometimes engage in property destruction, looting and vandalism to vent their
frustrations.

“It’s distracting,
it’s riot-shaming and it doesn’t really take into consideration the very real
anger and rage that people feel,” argued Gomez. “Why are people crying about
manifestations of capital coming down?”

“We’re looted all the time, so it’s only fair,” added Monay
Threats-McNeil, president of Harambee, the RIC Black Student Union.

St. Louis native
Frankie Edwards agreed. “Us breaking something that you can replace? That’s not
violent. Only thing that’s violent is when Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown.
You can’t get your life back,” he said.

“The world wouldn’t
have even paid attention to Mike Brown if the youth of Ferguson did not go burn
shit down to get the attention of the people they been trying to get forever,”
argued Rashad, another St. Louis protester.

Most of the property
destruction in the aftermath of Brown’s killing was incited by police, who
fired tear gas at protesters and into the yards of residential homes.

Arnita, a Ferguson
resident and protester, told me that the air in her neighborhood was so
saturated with tear gas at the time, the noxious substance eventually invaded
her home through the air-conditioning vents. Arnita’s late father fought in the
Second World War. As we spoke, she was holding her father’s flag upside down,
the official signal of distress.

“I don’t deal with
tear gas every day. So to have them tell us, ‘this is how you do it’ — that’s
beautiful,” said Morris.

He continued: “We’re
living in a globalized world. To loosely quote Malcolm X, you can’t have civil
rights until you have human rights. Atrocity is atrocity regardless of if it’s
in the Gaza Strip or in a North County suburb.”

“We need a worldwide revolution. You seein’ it in Palestine. You
seein’ it here. We got to make sure it spreads all over,” Pittsburgh rapper and
activist Jasiri X told
me.

After visiting Palestine with a delegation of Black American
artists, activists, academics and writers in late 2013, Jasiri released “Checkpoint,”
a track based on the oppression he witnessed during his trip.

“I thought white
supremacy [in America] was the worst that I’d seen, until I went to Palestine,”
he said. “But what I saw was people that were dehumanized and treated as
nothing simply because they were Palestinian. And here you see people that are
criminalized and demonized and dehumanized simply because we’re Black and brown
folks, and so we definitely should have that solidarity.”

“We should not only
share how to deal with tear gas,” he added, “but also best practices and best
strategies that work.”

Fair Use NoticeThis site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml . If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.